"I was involved in a cloning project. .. to send me into outer space along with a lot of other people. Not the whole me - just a hair from my head, while I still had some. I would thus pop up in another galaxy in the distant future."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Leave it to Jack Williamson to elaborate on the life of asteroid miners.

His welding arc dangled at his belt, the electrode still glowing red. He had just finished securing to this slowly-accumulated mass of iron his most recent find, a meteorite the size of his head.[1]

Five perilous weeks he had labored, to collect this rugged lump of metal—a jagged mass, some ten feet in diameter, composed of hundreds of fragments, that he had captured and welded together. His luck had not been good. His findings had been heart-breakingly small; the spectro-flash analysis had revealed that the content of the precious metals was disappointingly minute.

[Footnote 1: The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars
and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the
platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small
quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be
fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law,
should occupy this space.]